KOTANI, Eric

   Pseudonym used by US astrophysicist and writer Yoji Kondo (1933-) for all his fiction. He has been professor of astrophysics at the University of Oklahama (1972-7), the University of Houston (1974-7), the University of Pennsylvania (from 1978) and concurrently the George Mason University (from 1989), with over 100 scientific papers to his credit. He has editedthe journal Comments on Astrophysics since 1979, was President of the International Astronautical Union Commission on Astronomy from Space1985-8, and received a NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement in 1990. Compared with the evident achievements of his academic career, his fiction has been quite deliberately lightweight, though vigorously speculative within those limits, consisting in general of adventures substrated by HARD-SF concerns. He is perhaps best known for a NEAR FUTURE sequence written in collaboration with John Maddox ROBERTS: Act of God (1985), The Island Worlds (1987) and Between the Stars (1988). The actionis at times congested, and is somewhat unrelentingly military in orientation, but the vision that unfolds of a bustling and expanding Solar System frequently exhilarates. Delta Pavonis (1990), also with Roberts, isagain an sf adventure; and Supernova (1991) with Roger MacBride ALLEN, probably his most interesting novel to date, recounts with gripping verisimilitude the scientific process involved in discovering that a nearby star is due to go nova and flood Earth with hard radiation - which happens.

   JC

   Other works: Requiem: New Collected Works by Robert A. Heinlein (coll 1992) ed as Yoji Kondo.